Police Hunt for Escaped Murder Suspect, Allegedly Aided by Ex-Jailer in Street Clothes Breakout
A former prisoner has been caught in connection with the escape of a Mississippi prisoner from the courthouse. It took 15 hours of fighting, but that prisoner was finally caught last week in Chicago, just blocks away from the Democratic National Convention.
Bailey C. Martin of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety told PEOPLE that Ronnie Hunt is charged with helping prisoners escape and giving them things that would help them do so. Martin also said that “additional charges are probable.”
Based on video footage seen by the Associated Press, Joshua Zimmerman, the prisoner who got away, left the DeSoto County Courthouse in Hernando, Mississippi, on June 14. He was wearing khakis and a white shirt. He wasn’t tied down.
The Associated Press (AP) says Zimmerman was facing major charges in Mississippi, Texas, and Connecticut before he escaped. On the day he escaped, he was supposed to go to court on charges of attempted murder and armed robbery.
According to the AP, he is also charged with killing Keyanna Mercer in a Houston hotel on September 2, 2023. The victim was found shot dead in the head by motel workers after multiple reports that the suspect and the woman had been fighting.
The AP says Zimmerman will be sent back to Texas to face those charges.
The AP also said that he was wanted again for a felony sexual abuse case from Connecticut in 2022. He had already pleaded not guilty and been freed on a $200,000 bond before that warrant.
An AP report says that Zimmerman was arrested again on August 21 at a seafood restaurant in Chicago, where police think he had found work.
The Democratic National Convention was going on at the same time Zimmerman was arrested. The Marshals Service told the AP that there was “no connection or threat to the event or those attending.”
It wasn’t clear right away where Zimmerman was being held or if he had hired a lawyer, but the AP had said that Mississippi officials wanted to bring him back to the state.
Bailon tells PEOPLE that Hunt is being held at the Lafayette County Detention Center in Oxford, Miss.
Bailey said that the investigation by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation and the state’s Attorney General’s Office is still going on. Bailey wouldn’t say anything else and wouldn’t answer some of PEOPLE’s questions, like if Hunt had hired a lawyer and when he was next due in court.
Based on the AP story, Hunt, 32, was fired from his job as a deputy jailer for the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Department after the escape in June.
No response from the sheriff’s office in time for publication, but PEOPLE called to check how long he had been working there and to ask if he had a history of bad behavior.
The sheriff’s office said in a statement released on August 28 that Zimmerman’s escape “exposed” their security “weaknesses,” which they said had since been “rectified.”
“For safety reasons, we will not tell the public about the new security measures we have put in place,” the department said in the statement.